Encyclopedia of

Freud, Sigmund

In 1856 Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was born above a
blacksmith shop in the Moravian town of Freiberg, his father an
unsuccessful wool merchant. The family moved to Leipzig, then to Vienna,
but continued to experience economic hardship. His mother—young,
beautiful, and dynamic—was the center of his emotional life while
his father was described as distant and ineffectual. Freud came of age
during a renewal of anti-Jewish sentiment in Vienna after a
more liberal policy had encouraged the belief that people would be judged
on their merits rather than their religion.

Freud earned his medical degree at the University of Vienna and became an
adept neuroscientist whose research advanced knowledge of the nervous
system and uncovered the anesthetic properties of cocaine. Nevertheless,
his discoveries failed to win a secure position. Unable to support a wife,
he corresponded daily with his beloved Martha Bernay while studying in
Paris with a superstar physician and researcher, Jean Martin Charcot, who
opened Freud's eyes to the importance of psychological factors
(especially displaced sexuality) in producing physical symptoms. History
has not been kind to Charcot's assertions, but he opened up a new
world of possibilities to young Freud.

Setting himself up in clinical practice in order to support a family,
Freud married Bernay and together they eventually had six children,
including daughter Anna who became a distinguished psychoanalyst and child
advocate in her own right. Freud's clinical practice started in a
discouraging way. Patients were few and difficult to treat successfully.
He used the methods then in vogue and also tried, but abandoned, hypnosis.
Freud had expected much of himself, longing to be part of the new wave of
scientists who were transforming medicine and society—and here he
was, barely able to pay the bills. The death of his father was a further
blow. The way out of these difficulties proved to be the way in—to
the secrets of his own mind. Freud became both the first psychoanalyst and
the first analysand (one undergoing psychoanalysis).

New Theory of the Human Mind

In
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) he reported (in a selective form) his self-analysis but also set
forth an audacious new theory of the human mind. He elaborated, applied,
and at times revised this theory over the years. Freud offered a complex
vision of the human condition. He contended that adult personality is the
outcome of experiences and conflicts beginning in early childhood.
Neuroses result from difficulties in coping with fears, desires, and
conflicts during the process of psychosexual development. Freud further
held that conscious thought is a surface activity beneath

Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud became, perhaps, the first major
thinker to recognize both the importance and the pervasiveness of
grief.

CORBIS

which the unconscious operates according to its own rules. Much of the
individual's emotional energy is tied up in an attempt to prevent
threatening memories and conflicts from breaking through into
consciousness. Furthermore, he believed that society itself has its own
neurotic processes that often take the form of rituals and taboos. Mature
persons are the ones who have become liberated from the hold of the past
and accepted and integrated their basic impulses into a larger and more
functional self.

Freud's new way of thinking about human thought and relationships
led troubled people to seek his therapy and aspiring disciples to want to
study with him. He was financially secure and in the midst of the
international intellectual ferment for the remainder of his long life, but
he was troubled throughout that life by a series of harrowing events:
Friends died, some by their own hand; the brutality
of two wars intensified his concern about the future of civilization;
physical pain tormented him for years; and the Nazis systematically
destroyed his books and the works of other Jewish authors, leading to his
reluctant departure from Vienna.

Freud on Death

At first Freud was dismissive of death concerns (thanatophobia). He
believed that people who express fears of dying and death are—way
deep down—actually afraid of something else, such as castration or
abandonment. Humans could not really fear death because they had never had
this experience and because finality and death are not computed by the
unconscious. This view remained influential for many years after Freud
himself started to take death more seriously.

It was grief that came foremost to Freud's notice. Not only had
many died during World War I, but also many of Freud's family
members and friends were suffering from depression, agitation, physical
ailments, and suicidal thoughts and behavior. Later he realized that many
people lived in grief for deaths not related to the war and that these
losses might account for their various emotional and physical problems.
Freud's grief-work theory suggested the importance of expressing
grief and detaching emotionally from the deceased in order to recover full
function.

His most sweeping—and controversial—suggestion took the form
of death instinct theory, which postulated that all living creatures
engage in an ongoing scrimmage between competing impulses for activity and
survival on the one hand, and withdrawal and death on the other. This
theory was associated with Freud's ever-intensifying fears that
human destructive impulses would eventually destroy civilization if not
all life on Earth unless they were rechanneled by improved child-rearing,
psychoanalysis, and more effective societal patterns. To the last he hoped
that acts of love could counteract the destructive impulses. It was not
long after his death in London on September 23, 1939, that Anna Freud
organized an effective mission to save the children of that city from Nazi
rockets and bombs.